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SPORTS
Gay Games Wrap Up
Atlanta's softball team cops a surprise gold medal from L.A.'s Griffs
by Jim Marks
“This is not a movement about sexual preferences,” said
emcee Robin Tyler at the opening of Gay Games III. “This
is a movement about the right to love.”
Gay Games III, held in Vancouver, British Columbia,
August 4-11, was an event about gay and lesbian people in
a larger sense: physical but not just sexual, athletic but cul
tural as well. At its most idealistic, Gay Games III was
about a visionary ideal, as Canadian MP Sven Robinson
(quoting Judy Chicago) put it, a vision of a “new Eden” of
sexual equality.
Those ideals were defined in a moving (if overlong)
opening night ceremony Saturday, August 4.
But for the athletes, the games didn't really begin until
the competition did. For the swimmers, that was at 8:00
Sunday morning as heat after heat churned up the Aquatic
Centre's 50 meter lanes. Competition ended August 11, at
the close of a men's soccer match, between the New York
Rumblers and Berlin Vorspiel. They called it a day after
120 dusty minutes of play—with Berlin eking out a 1-point
victory, and a bronze medal.
The Games' steady growth over the years became pal
pable at the Triathlon. At Gay Games II in 1986, the
triathlon had been held in the Berkeley Hills, miles distant
from public transportation. In attendance were the athletes,
a few friends and lovers, a scattering of volunteers and
spectators, and no more than a half-dozen gay journalists
and photographers.
But in Vancouver, the triathlon was a five-minute walk
from the heart of the city's gay community. The competi
tors surged down the English Bay Beach in 3 waves—men
30 and under, 30 and over, and women—each group nearly
as large as the entire 1986 field.
I was the lone District of Columbia witness to the Gay
Games II triathlon. In Vancouver there were at least 20
Washingtonians cheering them on. They clustered around
the finish line, going crazy when one of their own, Scott
Barrows, came in first in his under-30 age group, and sec
ond over all. But the more things change, the more they
stay the same: first place finisher Ian Nash from
Melbourne, Australia, repeated his Gay Games II victory.
Swimming, an event run by the host English Bay Swim
Team, displayed the same meticulous organization as the
triathlon. Tennis seemed to be pretty much running itself.
Soccer, too, was a complicated event smoothly run, both by
organizers Francie Kara and Melanie Woodal and by gay
head referee B.J. Millar. Robin Chambers presided over the
potential chaos of the wrestling tournament—in which
each wrestler is designated a new opponent immediately
upon winning or losing a match—with a calmness that
made it all look easy.
Other sports were not so lucky. Volleyball, the largest
single sport, narrowly averted disaster. According to an
official with the North American Gay Volleyball
Association, two hours before the captains' meeting,
Vancouver organizers confessed that they didn't know how
many teams were coming, didn't know how to seed teams,
and didn't have a schedule. There were also eight "ghost"
teams—teams listed as participants, who never showed
up—that further played havoc with a last-minute schedule.
Track and field was plagued by a host of problems, too.
On Sunday the distance runners learned that only five,
instead of the promised 20, University of British Columbia
track officials would be on hand for the week's events.
Track and field participants took up much of the slack.
M. J. Murphy
There was one real fiasco—the women’s ten kilometer
run on Tuesday morning. Beginning over 30 minutes late,
runners had to deal with a road unmarked in spots. Some
women got lost or unwittingly took short cuts. To com
pound the problem, the men's 35-and-over heat began close
to its scheduled start, meaning the lead pack of about 40
male runners encountered the lead women on the narrow
est, most dangerous stretch of the race. New York's Sue
Foster, the race favorite, had to run on heavily-traveled
Boundry Road to avoid the crush of men on the path. The
race was declared unofficial, and rerun on Friday.
It wasn't easy in the whirl of events to get a feel for
how Vancouver was taking the games. The local press—
The Vancouver Sun and the tabloid Province—ran fairly
brief, colorless stories. The Sun ran a prominent Op-Ed box
—complete with illustration—containing four anti-gay let
ters to the editor, and featured a gay-bashing and homopho
bic graffiti in a metro section story. Traveling all over the
metro area, it was obvious the Games were bringing lots of
gay visibility to Vancouver's tree-lined streets. The Sun
reported the games would pump between 28 and 30 million
(Canadian) gay dollars into the city's economy.
Perhaps the Vancouver media's coverage accounted for
the treatment Games organizers gave the press, as if it was
a necessary, barely-tolerated evil".
“I trust you are getting all that you need,” Games publi
cist Doug Hughs said to me at Wednesday night's feather
and leather International Fantasy Ball. Since communica
tions director Sarah Temple had threatened to revoke my
credentials for photographing the physique contest the
night before, I was at a loss for words.
The physique contest was as much show as athletic
endeavor. After the intermission, a group of men and
women in the lighter weight classes took up seats in the
front rows. As one of the women, performing to classical
music, hit "shot" after "shot" in her posing routine, they
could be heard orgasmically murmuring “yes...yes" in
tribute to her ability. Atlanta light heavy-weight Dan
Rhoney's posing routine stirred up cries of “Dan! Dan!
Dan!” from the excited audience.
Press was allowed into the International Fantasy Ball,
even if it was firmly swept out an hour and a half later.
Amidst the demons, drag queens and lady vampires, the
man in the California Highway Patrol Uniform (his work
clothes, he said) and the man in the Divine Miss M outfit
(complete with sequined mermaid tail and motorized wheel
chair), one caught glimpses of athletes (and parts of their
anatomies) one had seen before in a different milieu.
Fathers, mothers, sons and daughters were also in
attendance. A woman body builder's 10-year old son very
proudly photographed his mom at the physique preliminar
ies. When Marcie Bodeaux of Crockett, California, com
pleted the grueling triathlon, she celebrated with a three
way hug from her lover Mary Boston and sister Jean. Then
Marcie, Jean and father Patrick proudly posed for a photo.
At the closing ceremonies, Sara Lewinstein, the widow of
Gay Games founder Tom Waddell, shared the podium with
their daughter, Jessica, for the awarding of the Tom
Waddell Memorial Cup.
Atlanta provided one of the two major upsets at the
games. Our Atlanta All-Stars came from behind to beat
Los Angeles' Griffs in the softball finale, handing Griffs
its first loss all season. And in the soccer field, when Los
Angeles eked out a 1-0 victory over San Francisco—due in
part to brilliant work by goalie Frank Laanan in stopping a
penalty kick—the San Francisco Spikes experienced their
first ever loss in gay play.
At the closing ceremonies New York City was designat
ed host of Gay Games IV. Members of the “New York in
'94” organizing committee no doubt observed Gay Games
III with an eye to their future task. If there were any practi
cal lessons from the Games, they were that gay people are
going to have to learn how to cope with the problems creat
ed by the movement's increasing scale.
The lack of forethought on making the entire event
accessible to the press reflected a more complex issue—
whether the games are a celebration primarily for the bene
fit of the athletes, or whether they are as much about mak
ing a statement to the world.
Whatever the bumps on the road to New Eden, there
can be no doubt that for the athletes and cultural partici
pants Gay Games III was an uplifting, exhilarating event. If
Gay Games III left Vancouver drained and exhausted, it
also made a deep impression upon the city's gay communi
ty. At the Fantasy Ball, I met Rose Garbutt, bare from the
waist up save for a pair of suspenders, a leather cord
around her neck and a leather cap. Rose is the chef at Doll
and Penny's, an eatery that serves as the informal commu
nity center of gay Vancouver. She marveled at the line that
had appeared at the cafe's door five days earlier, and
remained. “Don't you guys ever run out of money? Don't
you ever get hung over? Don't you ever sleep?” she asked.
And then she added that the invasion had “changed
Vancouver, opened it up. You see girls holding hands—
guys holding hands. I witnessed a fag bashing the other
night, and the cops were there in three minutes. Four squad
cars. Amazing.”
Todd Yates, Fred Holland and Mike Holloway
of Atlanta's gold medal softball team
Jim Marks
... _. M.J. Murphy
Santa Cruz stirs it up in a game vs. Vancouver